Come on Now, Boys
December 8, 2020
Words for Maxim Znak, detained in a Belarusian prison.
Valzhyna Mort
Valzhyna Mort’s new book of poetry, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, comes out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian.
Genesis
I’ve always preferred Cain.
His angry
loneliness, his
lack of his mother’s
love, his Christian
sarcasm: “Am I
my brother’s keeper?”
asks his brother’s murderer.
Aren’t we indeed
the keepers of our dead?
Let me start again:
I prefer apples that roll
far from the ...
A Song for a Raised Voice and a Screwdriver
Having climbed into my lap, the accordion
composes
its heavy breathing. Who
turned Gregor Samsa
into this black box? The old man
who taught me to play accordion banged
a screwdriver on a school desk.
For what?
For a ...